The present invention relates to coding of multi-view signals.
Multi-view signals are involved in many applications, such as 3D video applications including, for example, stereo and multi-view displays, free viewpoint video applications, etc. For stereo and multi-view video content, the MVC standard has been specified [1, 2]. This standard compresses video sequences from a number of adjacent cameras. The MVC decoding process only reproduces these camera views at their original camera positions. For different multi-view displays however, a different number of views with different spatial positions are necessitated such that additional views, e.g. between the original camera positions, are necessitated.
The difficulty in handling multi-view signals is the huge amount of data necessary to convey information on the multiple views included in the multi-view signal. In case of the just mentioned requirement to enable intermediate view extraction/synthesis, the situation gets even worse, since in this case the videos associated with the individual views may be accompanied by supplementary data such as depth/disparity map data enabling re-projecting the respective view into another view, such as an intermediate view. Owing to the huge amount of data, it is very important to maximize the compression rate of the multi-view signal codec as far as possible.